I'm glad I scrolled down further. I was wondering how and with what, you accomplished this. So,I gotta ask, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate this as a challenge? Great work. Enjoying watching it evolve.
Thank You!
Challenge? On a scale? Hard to say because it is giving me so much sheer enjoyment.
Compared to other scratch builds or kits however, I guess I could rate it as an 7 or 8, mostly do to "How to attach the boosters to the sustainer".
Thankfully, unlike my ongoing attempt at a TALOS, it has no moving parts, so that is nice, and it is a fairly stable design in the first place.
If you imagine it cutting through through the air, as if in a wind tunnel, it is essentially a cone, and the booster fins and exhaust nozzles generate a healthy dose of base drag. As long as my boosters are all balanced in every aspect it should fly just fine.
I may purchase and build the Fliskits Thunderbird to use as a test platform to see what happens if I add a few grams to one side or the other.
Either way, I'll make sure all my boosters have identical weights and centers of gravity before attaching them to the sustainer.
The next most challenging part, but which is doable, is getting the angles of the fins and wings correct. The fins I have found can be done with the sandwiched fiberglass cloth method that Sunderll posted recently, and I may use paper skins on the wings, but that requires little thought, so I have not made it to that step yet. I'm still most concerned with the attachment points of the boosters.
It may take me a year to complete this build, but that's fine by me. When it is done, I will have advanced my skillsets and learned new ones, making me a more proficient modeler for the next "Challenge".